


what it makes of hate

by remnantof



Series: T/Jverse [5]
Category: DCU, DCU - Comicverse
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Arguing, Cohabitation, Established Relationship, Interracial Relationship, M/M, Nightmares, PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-09
Updated: 2011-08-09
Packaged: 2017-10-22 10:17:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/237018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/remnantof/pseuds/remnantof
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Established relationship: Tim and Jaime move to Austin together while Jaime is at university, but leaving Gotham behind is harder than either of them expected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	what it makes of hate

**Author's Note:**

> This is a rough draft that sat in google docs for too many weeks. Thanks are once again to Peaches for audiencing most of it and putting up with my whining.
> 
> ADDITIONAL WARNING: while it does not occur within the story, date-rape and non-con situations are mentioned/alluded to as part of the plot.

The first few months of living with Tim feel a lot like the first year of college--like living in the dorm and taking freshman biology courses, seeing people at entrances and exits. Exchanging a couple of words with Reehan on their way into and out of the library; Eric clapping him on the back at the fraternity house as he shows up late to another meeting; Levi lifting a tired arm above the back of the couch when he finally came through the door each night, passing into a miasma of takeout, sweat, and exhaustion.

Okay, it’s not exactly like that--he knows Tim actually stays in their affordable-for-Jaime one-room apartment because it’s always clean and aired out when he gets home. There’s always something to eat in the kitchen, even if it’s (irritatingly nice, therefore pricey) takeout, or the kinds of simple fare Tim can actually make, or just a fridge full of ingredients for Jaime to pick at or cook. That’s nice--the first year on his own, Jaime hadn’t been prepared for it at all. Not having Bianca going shopping, making sure there was food for everyone. Just a bunch of guys in a dorm fending for themselves. Now he sits with Tim at the kitchenette counter and tries not to fall asleep so he can laugh at the way his boyfriend peels all the cheese and toppings off his pizza if it isn’t like, gluten-whey-wheat-lactose-corn syrup free and wrapped individually in gold foil and cooked in the heart of a volcano, or something. They’ve been doing this for a few years now, and Jaime still runs up against new walls, new things Tim can’t or won’t eat. Walls are par for the course, though. People tell him it’s a Bat thing, but Jaime’s met the rest of Tim’s family, and.

Okay, it’s a Bat thing, Tim’s walls are just very specific, and on a Great Wall of China versus Maximum Security Prisons sort of scale. It’s only part of the problem.

The other part is their schedules: they only really see each other before one of them has to crash, before it’s time to sprawl out on the couch that is also a twin bed depending on where you put the pillows, and maybe it’s for the best that they sleep in it one at a time, because those mornings when Jaime gets to sleep in, actually try to touch his boyfriend--it’s like trying to cuddle in his old bedroom. It’s like trying to do anything in any of the beds they’ve used over the years, beds for single teenage boys with parents or Bat-people who didn’t know they were anything else; dorm beds; Tower beds. Tim hasn’t grown much in the time Jaime’s known him, but Jaime has. Still filling into his awkward limbs at twenty, still catching up, still ravenously hungry every three hours.

There’s a change jar on top of the fridge that Jaime picks through every morning, filling up his pockets for the free periods between classes, when there isn’t quite time to stop in or get through the cafeteria lines. Tim’s protests went from secreting snacks into Jaime’s bag to filling up the jar from his own pocket in a matter of weeks. The change shakes in his pockets on his way down three flights of stairs. It wouldn’t make sense if he said it to Tim, but it feels heavier. Or he’s just more aware of it than before, it has a different kind of weight.

The one room apartment, the shitty IKEA bed, splitting the rent down the middle--that’s Jaime, putting his foot down and trying to shift away from that weight. He says being miserable together is to build character, especially Tim’s character, but. It’s not really the space making them miserable. It’s not even each other, the way he expected. The way he kind of looked forward to having their fights in this little place with nowhere to run off to.

They haven’t fought in a month. Haven’t had the time or the energy before someone is asleep and someone is out the door, to class or patrol, someone wakes up and they do it all over again.

It’s all up in the air, waiting, and it’ll take more than the weight of some coins to drag it down.

-

Away from Gotham, the old dreams feel new again. The frequency is new in and of itself, all of them running together like a marathon at two in the morning. Nothing he hasn’t seen before but he sits, numbly fixated, through the whole thing. What he’s seen runs up against what he’s afraid to see against whatever metatextual bullshit his brain cobbles together in exhaustion. Sometimes it’s his dad, right there, or it’s just that sense of urgency. Climbing skyscrapers out of his own head trying to get there in time. Thinking, I’ve never even lived in a building like that as he comes out of it, puts life back in the original order.

Sometimes he’s on patrol, after he’s just come home from patrol, swinging through the city thousands of miles away and his line snaps. A line for every mile between here and there, snapping, the sound of thousands of bats taking flight. He’s falling, the Graysons are falling, Dick is diving to catch him and spreading a pair of leathery wings, and he’s screaming at Dick to stop, to save them instead.

Cassandra needs to tell him something but she doesn’t know how yet, she’s smaller and hungrier and her eyes stay wide but say nothing at all. Cuts open up underneath them and then it’s Stephanie’s face, all those little scars under the makeup.

The makeup gets paler and paler, her mouth opens and the teeth are too sharp, her Robin red lipstick turns purple, she’s wearing a Santa hat and turns around to shoot the couple in the back seat. It’s always his parents. His parents or Jason.

Blink: the Christmas lights on their winking timer are gone, it’s something else now. Ropey and white and--Scarab’s spinning a web from her hands, she puts them on his face to tilt it up and her touch burns like ice and fever.

Dick dives harder, he’s almost there. All the bats follow him down and black out the sky. The moon shines through a hole, becomes the white surface of a lens.

He falls until he’s crashing through every floor of the tower, down to his cave. Attempt ninety-six is failing; Cassie finds him trying to set his own shoulder back into the socket, trying to get to the controls. There’s no time for this Tim, he’s gone. We have to go to Haiti.

Why?

Tim, he’s got your parents. We have to go, we have to go--

But he’s not dressed, there’s nothing to wear but what’s in the cases. Kon’s shirt is like a nightgown and Jason’s costume just hangs around his body. He’s so young, he’s not ready. He can’t go. He can’t go like this, his pale preteen legs shivering in the damp of the cave and even the jock is too big, if he tried to fight in this--

He’s got your _parents._

I know, I know, but I _can’t_ \--

“What is it,” Jaime’s asking quietly, touching the side of his face as Tim wakes up. “What can’t you do Tim?” He sounds sleepy; Tim feels sleepy. There is the bed under them, and Jaime, too close. It was just a dream.

Jaime calls them nightmares. Calls them what they are, but it’s easier not to think of them that way. It’s the only kind of dream he has that he can remember, and he’s remembering a lot of them now. Tim doesn’t know if it’s sleeping more or just--all of this. Trying to adjust. Living in a place where he only knows one person, the tiny apartment, the tiny bed. Seeing Jaime every day--that’s the good part, right? He’s not supposed to wake up like this and wish Jaime had already left for class. Like every other time.

After a month, Tim still wakes up wondering where he is. Whose bed he is in, where Alfred is, what he did last night. Was he sore from the bed or did Killer Croc put him through a wall?

No: he’s still in Austin. Alone with his hands pressed against a bright yellow wall like he’s trying to fight it, like it’s whatever he dreamt he was falling against, climbing, feeling cramped and crushed by. Or Jaime is there, a tangle of limbs and hot breath against the back of his neck, or warm hands turning Tim over and shaking him. Or this: fingers in his hair, rubbing little circles. “Hm,” Tim asks, moving his head to shake Jaime’s grip.

“What can’t you do,” Jaime whispers, loosening his hands until Tim stops moving, replacing them, holding him still for a sleep-sour kiss. “You kept saying it: _I can’t, I can’t._ ” A groan starts in Tim’s throat and rumbles through him, makes his teeth buzz as he drags his face away and hits Jaime’s shoulder. It’s none of Jaime’s business. It’s too early for this shit.

“ _I can’t_ believe you expect me to remember some dream,” he sighs, “That’s what.”

Jaime lets him roll away and presses close again, sighing against the back of his neck. “Whatever Tim. Just go back to sleep, I’ll be here a few more hours.”

Tim doesn’t know why Jaime thinks he cares. How Jaime thinks he slept before this.

-

Jaime takes a Tim approach to solving the schedule problem: sleep less. When he gets home, he doesn’t just inhale his food and wander over to the bed. He takes slow, careful bites, chewing what he hopes is thoughtfully while Tim explains part of his latest case. Something to do with the school, and how he was going to put off cracking the prescription drug ring until after mid-terms (see, Jaime thinks, to no one in particular, just a faceless mass of real and imagined people capable of giving a shit, my boyfriend is nice. Can be nice. Sort of.), but when the Rohypnol comes from the same place as the Adderall, someone just needs to get drop-kicked into a dumpster. Jaime mumbles something about Jason approving, and then it’s like a mind-wipe, blanking out and blacking out and he wakes up three hours later in the shitty IKEA bed to an empty apartment and a note taped to his head about sleeping when he needs to, and the rest of his burrito is in the fridge.

There might be an _I love you_ or equally emotional closing to the note, in tiny script and invisible ink on the sticky part of the tape, in Kryptonian, but he doesn’t even ask the scarab to check. “Just wake me up when he gets back,” he says groggily, like his throat is still asleep. It feels like he’s swaying while laying down, and there’s nothing to do but burrow into the blankets and close his eyes, clutching the note in his hand.

-

Try it from the other end: waking up at four or five in the morning, whenever Tim crawls back through the window in the bathroom and turns on the shower. At first the swaying lingers and makes it feel like he’s moving underwater, or something thicker. In pre-set jello or a layer of pudding. God, he really wants some pudding. And some pancakes, but he’d have to make both, and Tim won’t be awake long enough to make it worth it.

He’s used to four or five now, maybe if he works his way back to three, he can have something ready when Tim gets home. For now, he’s just around to help Tim out of his uniform, hold him or just hold him up in the shower, wonder what the fuck is wrong with his boyfriend that he still does this outside of Gotham, and steer him to the bed for an hour of actually sleeping together before he has to get up and do his homework or head to class. If he’s prone to falling asleep while eating, Tim evens the playing field by passing out with Jaime’s tongue in his mouth, the little moans and whimpers dying off into a series of cock-blocking snores.

This isn’t working. Even on weekends, even on days Jaime is free from class, Tim sleeps until the afternoon and it never seems like enough. Jaime tells his friends Tim is pre-med and they make long, appraising noises as the underweight, raccoon-eyed gringo from old ass money suddenly makes sense. Jaime tells people this enough that he starts to wonder why the fuck it isn’t true. The dentist and the doctor, busting their asses for the piece of paper they can hang on a wall in their future office. Looks good on paper and Tim’s long hours and all-nighters would actually come with a paycheck. Not that he needs one, just. Jaime doesn’t _get _this. He’s heard the whole story, about the last Robin, about filling the gap, about how much Gotham really does need them.__

But he’s not Robin, and he’s not in Gotham. He’s just some kid who probably spends more time a night on street crime than real detective work when he could be getting his GED. Just some kid trying to take care of everyone but himself, which maybe makes sense when Jaime realizes, duh, he’s done that since he was thirteen, but. But _why_? He didn’t find the Robin suit one day and need to save someone’s baby. His friends weren’t in danger, his family was halfway across the country, and Batman was being, like, as scary as Batman ever gets. Which is probably the most terrifying thing in the known universe. If Jaime could just figure out what tipped the scales and set them the way they are now, everything weighing more than Tim himself--maybe he could fix it. Maybe he could convince Tim that Jaime, and Tim’s friends--they’re not supposed to be on the opposite side of the scale. They’re _with_ him, evening it all out.

At the very least, Jaime’s tangled up with him in a twin bed in a tiny apartment, worrying his bottom lip and noting the way Tim’s pulse twitches at his temple, still working too hard, even in sleep.

-

Tim is a better host than this. They both know it, they both keep exchanging looks over the heads of Jaime’s study-group, questions on his face that Tim can only shrug at. He went deep into the case last night, dug in to the bottom and came home even later than usual, all that dirt clinging to him before and after the shower. Jaime held him up against the cool tile and got on his knees in the spray, kissed and bit his way up Tim’s thigh until Tim had to shove his head away. “Please,” he’d said, voice thick with exhaustion and a throat sore from his cheap imitation of the Bat, growling at another date rapist and shaking him against the frat house’s wall until his head bounced off it enough times to knock some facts loose.

He didn’t want Jaime to touch him like that, when he was still covered in the pay dirt, still nauseous from it. There’s a coin dancing on its edge in his head: was it the overdose of self-awareness coming out brought on that made these cases that much harder to swallow, or, tails--is this how it’s supposed to feel, always, forever. Was not feeling this before half his fucking problem?

The easiest answer is Scarab, but trusting the easy answers is how he let situations like that come to a head.

The best answer is the way the coin dances, won’t fall one way or the other, and now the apartment is full of people and there’s nowhere to process it all. Put the facts together into more than answer, into an answer that binds, that holds up in court, that rips its way up through the players and cuts off their head. If this were just a visit from Brenda and Paco--if it were Jaime’s _grandmother_ \--he could dive in right at the kitchen counter, spread his notes out in the open and work. With Jaime’s frat brothers strewn on and around their bed with open textbooks to catch their pizza and beer when it falls: Tim’s wondering how long his battery will last on the roof and reconsidering the promise he made not to spend any more time underground.

Even Eric asks if they’re interrupting something, and his skills of observation haven’t exactly improved from the time he spent half an hour trying to grind up on Jaime’s ass while Tim stopped attempting to dance and stood two feet away, looking expectant while judging the pressure required for Eric’s body mass to hip-check him into the entertainment center, on accident, of course. _Everyone_ knows Tim can’t dance, no matter how many visits he spent making sure they knew very little for sure. Those lies were worth it for the way Jaime’s face screwed up before he closed his eyes and counted to a hundred, because Reehan just heard they met at a concert last month, and didn’t Jaime say it was a high school field trip?

“Mine’s more believable,” Tim had argued, just to argue. “How could you meet a dropout from Gotham on a field trip in Texas?”

“Mine is _true_ ,” and Jaime had put his hands on his head and started to wander away in frustration. “And it was believable enough until you started contradicting it. I thought you were _good_ at lying.”

Tim smiles at the memory, probably not the right smile--or the perfect smile, since he’s regarding Eric--for reassuring them all that no, they’re not, he just had to pull an all-nighter for class.

“Hey,” Reehan offers, setting his beer on the coffee table. “Any time you need help with one of those or just avoiding them altogether, the doors of Delta Lamdba Phi are open. You’re like a brother-in-law or something, and pre-med’s a fucking nightmare.”

“Is that why you switched to engineering,” Tim asks, smile going fixed and polite, nice as the offer is. He doesn’t know how Jaime does it, lets himself be drawn in and included by people he can’t include in return. It makes the inside of his head itch and the ache start up again in his chest, the one that says, more than the headaches or irritability, that he is too tired for this. For anything.

He’ll take his phone going off over five people in one room, and people he feels obligated to know, but not like, drinking on his bed. It’s Dick, which means, “Excuse me, I have to take this,” and a reason to finally duck out the only window, take the recently reinforced fire-escape up to the roof.

“Is everything all right,” he asks, “I have a secure line we can switch to--”

“Tim--Timmy, no, calm down.” Dick laughs, one of the few of them who does it so openly. Tim’s still working on it, even if his easier grins are enough for Jaime. Even smiles through a strain, looking down in the shower and petting back the wet hair where he shoved with his palm are enough for Jaime. “This is what humans refer to as a social call, something families engage in regularly, especially when their baby brothers have left the nest.”

“You sound like you’ve been hanging out with Jason, that might be reason enough to switch lines.”

“Guilty as charged, but still not necessary. We’ve been working some things out since you quit the family business in pursuit of happiness, or at least gave a really good impression that you were quitting and kept making headlines elsewhere. The new look is much better, by the way, and maybe next time I’ll let you switch lines so we can talk about that.”

Tim hums, letting his eyes flinch against the light cutting over the western horizon. This line is as secure as any phone he didn’t make himself can be, but he doesn’t need to confirm that for Dick, and he doesn’t need to make any promises for later. “I was just going to start putting ships in bottles and building model trains, but the apartment’s pretty small. Had to fill the time somehow. Not to mention the tragedy of leaving my bike locked up in a garage somewhere.”

There’s a patch of fuzz that could be interference, but is probably Dick swiping his hand--and phone--across his face. “As long as you don’t take up photography again,” he says. “You know, school is still an option. Which, yeah, so not my place to give that lecture, but Babs was lectured-out by the time you were potty-trained. Mostly because of me.”

“I was potty-trained before she met you.”

“And here I thought I made a solid contribution to your development, silly me.” The sound of Bruce’s chair swivelling in full circles isn’t familiar, but it feels that way, with Dick’s voice layered over it.

Tim snorts. “Seriously, you need to stop talking to Jason.”

“Is it that bad?”

“Yes Dick, I’m having flashbacks as we speak, and I was so hoping to keep those yellow tights out of my _waking_ nightmares.”

For several beats, even the chair quiets. Tim wants to slap the phone to his own forehead: he forgot that the land-mines in his history exist for both sides of any conversation. He never knows what he can or can’t make light of, even when people already know enough to follow along. Maybe especially then. “You know Jaime talks to me,” Dick starts.

“Uh-huh.” Definitely a land-mine, and Dick’s treading around the edge of the crater with none of the grace he possesses physically, trying to avoid another.

“He says you won’t talk about them. He says--”

That figurative foot is hovering over an open patch of earth. Tim imagines Dick can hear a faint beeping through the roughly lain sod, then imagines him putting his foot down in it anyway. He’s probably wincing on the other end of the line. “Tim, how often are you having them?”

His foot twists at the last minute and settles just to the side of the mine, shoving the ball into Tim’s court. His pulse picks up the pace, it feels like he’s dribbling his heart--that explains the heavy feeling in his chest but doesn’t tell him where he’s supposed to throw it.

Dick dives down with leathery wings folded against his back, the blue Nightwing symbol blazing electric blue and blinding in the dark. He’s trying to catch Tim even though he’s hardly the only one falling, hardly the only person in the world who needs saving.

Tim swallows, blinking the spots out of his eyes as the sun dips and mutes along the horizon. “Ask me again when we’re on a secure line,” he says, ending the call and shoving the phone into his front pocket.

-

The prescription drug ring is--was--run by a charismatic guy in Jaime’s second year chem lab, which is where campus security and two police officers come to collect him one afternoon in November. Jaime doesn’t know if this is for his benefit, or if Tim just decided drop-kicking the guy into a dumpster wasn’t his style after all. Knowing Tim, who probably has Jaime’s schedule memorized, and saved several times to his laptop, there is some purpose to the public arrest.

But maybe not. Jaime knows better than Tim that he can’t control everything. Maybe the officers just figured obligatory labs were a better bet than looking around a crowded dorm. The guy--Alex--causes enough of a scene trying to turn over one of the sturdy tables and flee out the first-storey window that their professor cancels the rest of lab with her head cradled in her hand, the other waving them away from the broken glass and upset experiments in the wake of the officer’s pursuit.

I kind of liked him, Jaime thinks, as his eyes adjust from florescent light to Texas sun, and he spots the officers cuffing Alex in the grass. He’d been funny, like, genuinely funny, and a reliable lab partner no matter how things got shuffled around. But he also sold date-rape drugs, and he would have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for Jaime’s meddling boyfriend. When he tries to remember the grinning kid who told their professor he was going to cure cancer, he just feels sick to his stomach. The ways people can do good and bad--or just be one and do the other--never fail to hurt him a little. Confuse him. It gets worse when he doesn’t know where to place his boyfriend on the scale, isn’t sure how the scale even works.

A rich white guy who’s been hurt a lot. All the power to hurt or help other people and not a lot guiding it, but he’s getting better, Jaime thinks. He’s trying, even if it isn’t enough, doesn’t work that way.

Jaime frowns. It’s three in the afternoon, he doesn’t have another class until six, and Tim should be up by now. If he isn’t already on a rooftop somewhere watching his handiwork with a pair of binoculars, scaring the shit out of anyone who spots him. Jaime flies home just to be sure, and to give the Scarab something to do, and, well, because it’s free. A few people shout and snap photos, but most of Austin is used to having a couple of former Titans watching over it by now.

[truth = stretched. titan attendance = spotty. patrol schedule = more so.]

“Shut up,” Jaime mutters, but his stomach drops in a way that has nothing to do with the altitude. Is that really the problem? Does Tim patrol as much as he does because Jaime doesn’t have time for it during the week? Is he stretching himself too thin because of the nightmares, or are they getting worse because he’s stretching himself too thin?

At the end of the day (or the beginning), they’re both falling asleep standing up and sitting at a computer while the other sleeps, trying to type as quickly and quietly as possible. Jaime helps when he can: he keeps Scarab set to warn him if Tim bites off more than he can chew, wake him up and propel him into action. One day, Tim is going to need him, and he’ll probably be half-awake when scarab punches a hole through their ceiling, and they’ll get evicted and move to an even shittier apartment, but Tim will be okay, and that’s what will matter, right?

Not really, he thinks. Not when Tim already isn’t okay. Not when the whole point of moving in together was to be there when it isn’t important, too.

[three pm on a saturday,] scarab reminds him.

Yeah, that’s not important at all.

-

It’s so important. It’s Tim waking up after the end of a case, smiling because hey, there’s his boyfriend. There are the armor-warm arms he comes home to in the morning, and Jaime kissing him too hard (just right) because life just doesn’t line up for them like this, not right now. Jaime’s trying, Tim knows he’s trying, but these things don’t work unless they meet in the middle.

He’s not ready to meet him yet. Except this, except colliding on a Saturday afternoon, or when he manages to stay awake long enough in the morning. The bed is so inadequate for this, the bed is a joke and Tim has the sore muscles to prove it, but the ache is just another good thing right now. The ache is going to get so much sweeter, Jaime sucking every kiss to his throat and that place under his jaw, that by some perfect design, makes him hiccup and claw at Jaime’s hair. Mess it up a little more and smooth it down as Jaime moves lower and lower, starts the routine and breaks it with shaking hands on Tim’s sweatpants, tugging everything down. And if Tim didn’t already know how much time they had, hadn’t included Alex McDowell’s class schedule in his anonymous tip--he’d know there was plenty from the way Jaime kneels at the edge of the bed and starts opening the drawers with his free hand, digging through the clothes for all those packets, spitting out foil and lube before putting his mouth back on Tim’s cock.

One hand goes in Jaime’s hair, the other arm crooks back and he grabs the long pillow behind his head, the one that smells like both of them because it’s all there is to hold onto when the other is gone.

Jaime’s right here, though. Jaime’s _right here_ , going down on him and scissoring him open, his body giving in to old rhythms, old patterns, trusting this and opening. This is how it should be. He should beg Jaime to do it already, and Jaime should still pause, and Jaime should still ask him one more time before he opens another packet, rolls the condom on.

Tim hopes Alex McDowell goes to jail. Tim hopes he names names, hopes he gets dragged through the mud, gets expelled. Hopes at least one college campus is a little safer without him around.

Tim hopes someone punches the universe and shatters it right now, suspends them in the aether so Jaime never has to stop fucking him. Just let go of the pillow and kiss him like they’re making up for lost time, which just. Feels like a _theme_ here, where Tim is married to a job he doesn’t even get paid for.

It’s fine. It works. He doesn’t know how else to live. Just--

just turn his sore body over and grunt when Jaime pushes, when he fucks his way back in, builds up the rhythm again. A new rhythm, one where their bodies don’t fight each other so much, but Jaime holds him around the stomach and he holds the back of Jaime’s neck, tries to hold them up with one hand but falls down gasping, making noises he’s sure the neighbors appreciate only hearing once in awhile, that they should be hearing all the time. They love each other and they live together and why, why aren’t they doing this all the time, Jaime just pushing the sounds out of him and sweating on him and he’s sweating on the sheets and just feeling it all, the hair on Jaime’s thighs and their ankles crossed together, the hand hooked at his hip and moving in to stroke him and Jaime’s cock moving through it all, everything else is secondary but still so much a part of it when Tim bites down on his wrist and shouts, comes all over the sheets, makes today laundry day.

Jaime finishes himself off and drops sweat and spit damp kisses to the damp skin of Tim’s back as he pulls out, and Tim doesn’t even care, really. He’s remembering the old them, maybe the first incarnation of _them_ , as a pair that went together. When they were just friends, or telling themselves that, anyway. When he slept over so he wouldn’t spend another night in the Tower, making Eddie feel anxious and babysat. He’d help Jaime with his homework or his chores, and it didn’t feel so--so urgent. It was something to get out of the way before they could patrol, but also just--an excuse to be together. He could have shown up after Jaime finished those things, but he never did. Always before. Learning to do the things they do on their own now, laundry and dishes, setting a table. Things to do out of respect, out of love.

It’s a routine now. It fills his day when he’s not tracking amateur drug dealers. Sometimes Tim wants the world to implode again, just so he can stop _waiting_ for it.

He can always feel it now, buzzing under his skin. The old urgency from his childhood made new again. There's never enough to do: it feels like never doing enough. He cuts his legs trying to shave them for the tights, drops and scrambles to catch things as he cleans. Stays out later than necessary cleaning up streets that actually stay clean for awhile. Jaime slides through it all with a series of sighs and wary looks, assessing, forming theories, casting them aside. Sometimes Tim can feel it on the back of his neck, that stare. The air tightens up around them, he waits for a question, for a fight about anything, everything, nothing. It hasn't come yet. One more thing he isn't fixing. One more thing to implode.

Tim breathes against Jaime's shoulder. If it does, when it does, Gotham is waiting. Bruce is waiting. There would be a look, and it would say I told you and I'm sorry and be ready at twenty-one hundred, without so much as a blink. He would be imagining the apology. He would be expecting the I told you so. In their family, imagination and expectation have as much to do with identity as any measure of the truth does.

That’s not quite it. That’s--that’s everyone, surely. Even Jaime, at his back, as good as everyone thinks he is, _because_ they all believe it. Every action, even the arbitrary, reads a certain way.

They roll into the pillows and fall asleep, Tim lulled by every puff of breath into his hair.

-

Tim wakes up around six, has a moment of panic over the things he slept through: casework, new cases, the dishes, dinner. Then another, when he wakes up enough to remember, when he hears, then sees, Jaime washing up in the sink. Why is he still here?

"Did they cancel your class," he asks, sleep heavy, cotton-mouthed.

“Nope.” The clipped sound of one dish laid against another makes Jaime’s tone sound all the shorter. Gotham is waiting; Tim doesn’t want to name the voice in his head counting down every porcelain and plastic click, but he’s sure zero precedes a manic burst of laughter. He glances out the window, orange light and long shadows, until the nagging subsides.

“You’re just not going?”

“Ci.”

Click, clack. Tick, tock.

He’s not ready for this: roll off the bed, find a pair of sweatpants--no, jeans--and head for the bathroom. Jaime’s not talking and that’s fine with him. It’s his turn to clean up anyway, and maybe when he’s done, when Tim cleans the afternoon from his skin and the cobwebs from his head, the apartment will be empty, back to normal.

Or just quiet, Jaime drying dishes as Tim dries his hair, walks back to the bed and finds a shirt in the drawers. A shirt and socks, he just needs his shoes, phone, keys. Just needs to feel them on his person to feel--to feel. There are two kinds of impatience tripping him here, when he asks, “Where are my shoes,” pulls the pin and stands by the fridge, just holding it. Jaime mutters something, part of it heard and part of it read from his lips: _which ones_? If Tim doesn’t answer, doesn’t grab that bait and shake it between his teeth, that could be all of it. Jaime could dry the dishes, sit down at the counter and tell big brother Dick all about it on his Facebook wall or something.

“You didn’t have to do that Tim.” The dishes get set down and the towel laid over them, Jaime’s hands coming to rest against the sink’s edge, holding on. “He broke things trying to escape, we were in lab. It could have been dangerous.”

There it is. It’s not his shoes or keys, more like the grenade rolling back at him, or a beeping pile of sod, but it trips the same sense of relief. He’s not Dick: he won’t wince or step around it. “Even with a superhero in the room?”

Jaime squeezes the counter, and for a moment the beeping seems real--that voice Tim still doesn’t understand hum-buzzing through the air, making his wisdom-teeth itch. “You can’t goad me into saving people!”

“You really think I would do that?”

“OH TELL ME YOU WOULDN’T.” Primary and secondary blasts, pressure before the heat, before it sucks itself in and pushes out again. Tim feels rooted to the floor as Jaime starts to move, one hand free and turning: “You’d do that before you’d _ask_ for the help.”

That moves him, a little shock, another itch, setting one foot back and carving a grimace across his face. What does Jaime think this is about? “Yeah Jaime, we sure put away a lot of criminals in the last three hours.”

“Shut the fuck up, Tim.”

“Or what?” There it goes, all the oxygen sucked out, everything braced for the second blow out and Jaime red in the face, somewhere between angry and embarrassed and lost. There isn’t even a word for it, just a growl hissing through his teeth. Here it comes, Tim’s feet shifting, cotton on smooth wood and Jaime’s eyes flaring like he didn’t know this was a fight. Of course it’s a fight. “Or _what_ Jaime? Are we doing this or not?” Jaime swallows all his air and there he is, shoving at Tim, sending them nowhere. There’s nowhere to go, feet sliding and hands grappling everywhere. Jaime pulls his hair, the air tightens up and there, there, rushing around them. Finally, _something_. All the routines broken, everything half-done and sheets balled up on the floor, all the safety of it inverted and barbed, hitting his back when Jaime shoves him into the fridge. Tim’s hard again and laughing: what sick piece of him is attracted to this, the idea that Jaime could _hate _him?__

Jaime _should_ hate him.

It’s not there when he kisses Jaime, when Jaime shoves him a little more, waiting for Tim to fight back, do a little more than search for that heat. That’s not how it works, his hands are too busy at Jaime’s hips, pulling them closer, to push Jaime away. He doesn’t want him away, he wants Jaime to feel it, biting his mouth and there’s lost time for this too, for all the fights they should have had before they got here. He hasn’t met Jaime halfway on that either.

He can start now. turn them around and there is a difference between gentle and controlled when he backs Jaime into the counter and drops to his knees. There’s a difference between controlled and gentle when he leans his head into Jaime’s stomach and just needs a moment, just hold it all still while their ears ring from the blast.

-

Tim recovers faster but it’s not the same as recovering _well_. Jaime doesn’t even know what to do with it, with Tim’s hands on his thighs and that mouth on his skin, the soft spot just under the hem of his sweatpants. That hem going down while he finds himself, grounds himself and steadies against the counter before bumping Tim away with his hips. Not hard, just, “Stop it, Tim. This is--” embarrassing is the first thing coming to mind, Jaime grabs that with both hands and holds on. There’s something _wrong_ with this.

This is. It’s _something_ , and the scarab hums at Jaime’s powers of observation and description while he scowls down at his boyfriend. He doesn’t think like the scarab, he doesn’t think like Tim. There’s a lot more grasping at things, a lot of leaping without looking and feeling his way out of the dark. “Isn’t this what you wanted,” Tim asks, and it’s so quiet, just water settling in the pipes and dishes shifting together. Just a tense space, Jaime wants to open the window and air it out, but that’s not how it works. “I know, the other day--I was just tired Jaime. I’ll work on it--”

“No, Tim--”

Tim doesn’t get it _at all_. Jaime wants to push him down on the floor and punch the point into his face. Jaime wants to sink to his knees and kiss him as carefully as he knows how. Hit him and cry on him and shake him until he splits open and something comes _out_. He covers his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose. “I’m not mad. Tim I’m not _mad_.” It’s a subtle thing. It’s the scale, it’s the kind of thing you hear about in your 101 psych class and just--he just has to feel it out. How wanting to help his boyfriend turns into this. How loving someone and hating them are so close sometimes, and what does that make of hate anyway?

Jaime doesn’t know. Not how to feel it the way other people feel it. Bad people do good things, good people do bad things. Maybe people just _do things_ and the rest comes after, but he doesn’t know how to feel that way either. It sounds like something that went from Tim’s head to his while they were sleeping. Or right now, when Tim is sitting back on his heels and his stupid fussy face is blank and looking up at Jaime. Nothing on it because he doesn’t want Jaime to see, and that. _That_ is the fucking problem.

The fucking problem is: his boyfriend had another nightmare during an afternoon nap, daylight in a city that can take care of itself and Jaime right there, and Tim doesn’t even know. The fucking problem is: his boyfriend scratched at the wall and elbowed Jaime until he had to get up, and now he’s on his knees in the kitchen because he thinks Jaime’s mad about how often he gets laid. Now he’s on his knees in the kitchen looking petulant, saying in a voice that is all soft long vowels and flat as his stare, “Isn’t this why you skipped class?”

“I skipped class so we could talk!” Jaime’s voice rings against wooden cabinets and dry air. They sound so different, even speaking the same language. He can’t remember the last time he felt on the same page, in the same book, as Tim. Tim’s book is a fucking diary hidden in a cave with an old school lock and key, and he hasn’t found it yet, doesn’t want to find it, wants Tim to hand it to him. To hand it to anyone, but especially him, “Please.”

When Tim stands, they difference in their heights is noticeable, but slight. If Tim were taller, if he didn’t have to gaze slightly up at Jaime through his lashes--Jaime wonders if they’d even be here, if it wasn’t the way Tim’s eyes looked wider, younger when he looked at Jaime that made him notice them. The first time they met, Tim had inches on him, and masks, and. And if he were taller, if he could pull his cowl on right now, would this be easier? He can’t kneel for it. He doesn’t have to.

Maybe Jaime should. For now, he just pulls his pants back up and slouches against the counter, takes some of the weight off his frame. There, Tim’s gaze levels out before he drops it. Maybe none of it matters, maybe if Tim were taller, the only difference would be how easily Jaime could duck under that dropped gaze. He would push it sideways. Jaime wants to grab him by the ears and make him look. This fucking guy, who puts on a blank face and stares down guys with swords and guns, but can’t look at his boyfriend when they’re having a conversation in the kitchen. What do you _do_ with that?

“Tim, it’s getting worse.” Both flinch, but Tim doesn’t see it. Jaime sees, gets thrown again. He doesn’t want to look either now. Wanted to punch him, wanted to hurt him, but seeing the flinch is different. “And Dick says you won’t tell him about it either, and just. Who can you tell? Who do I need to get on the phone or into this apartment who will help?

“I just want to help. That’s all this is about.”

Just a glance, up through the lashes, before Tim looks down again. Scratches his wrist in a way that could be described as _absently_ , but Jaime isn’t sure. Jokes about invisible ink aside, he wonders--are there really signs everywhere? Notes his boyfriend doesn’t mean to write, things he doesn’t mean to say? If the scarab could just translate the scratches on the wall and cross reference against--against every other place Tim’s nails have dragged, what would they find out? “There’s too much,” Tim sighs, giving up on more than Jaime can follow at once. “It’s too much shit, most of it past the sell-by date, Jaime. And nobody wants to hear it, nobody has--there isn’t room in our lives for it, okay? I’m not going to bother Dick when he has so much going on in Gotham as it is.” Tim has a trick, Jaime’s learned, of getting out of these things. Getting out of most things, really, just by saying things in that calm, flat voice. Just by sounding rational. There are layers in the words, layers under his fingernails: dead skin and chipped paint and roof grit and nomex. Nightmares and need and never being enough. Good enough, bad enough, strong or smart or fast enough.

“I have room,” Jaime says, pushing away from the counter, starting across the feet between them. His feet are used to the tile, just a flat surface pushing up against his weight pushing down, then Tim’s foot pressing on his knee to make him stop. “I want to hear it, I want you to talk to me--”

Then Tim’s foot pressing harder, sharper, to make Jaime stumble back as the calm breaks and the rational tone disappears. “Talk about what, about how fucked up I am? How much shit I’ve been through? What do you want to hear, Jaime, because it won’t make you feel any better.” The flat vowels close up and like a hot kettle, a whine pushes at the air and makes it mocking, the edge of hysterical: “Hi, my name’s Tim Drake and I run around in tights every night because my own _skin_ feels like a suit I can’t get off!”

There isn’t anything to say to that--and it isn’t that irrational, is it, thinking Jaime won’t feel better if he knows. When Tim talks to him, really talks to him, there’s never anything left to say. There are things that punch him in the gut and never really stop. There is a lot of darkness to feel his way through, and he’s still asking Tim to fill it with things. Sharp things, ugly things, to trip over and learn the shape of in that dark. He’s grasping something right now, letting it settle under his hands and warm to the touch. Whatever else there is to find and feel out, he thinks--part of it, the part he can feel now--Tim doesn’t want him to get hurt. Tim never wants anyone to get hurt. Jaime can push against that foot and knock Tim’s hands away, hug him up against the kitchen island until he stops trying to squirm out of Jaime’s grip. “Stop,” they say, one after the other, their different voices from different pages, flipping together.

“Stop.”

“Tim, stop.”

“Jaime--”

Tim stops. Aims his gaze down, but there’s Jaime, nuzzling up under his jaw and catching those eyes. There’s Jaime, turning his body into a dead weight, one Tim could hold up but doesn’t, dragging them to the floor. Where they could crawl into the cabinets and hide with the pans and pipes, or curl up on the tile, or just sit with their legs in an uncomfortable tangle, pressing Tim into the doors. “I’ll help you out of it,” Jaime murmurs, hands a little clammy around Tim’s wrists. No scratching now. “If you want. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, just. I _want_ you to, okay? I want to listen, I want to make room for it, even if it’s old. Even if it’s scary.”

The struggle stops, takes a different shape. Jaime’s hands follow Tim’s in instead of out, drawn close, drawn between them. There are times when Jaime is feeling his way through it all, where he just stops. Where he’s just _done_ , until something makes him push a little further, a little further after that. There are other times where he stops because--because Tim just pulls away. Pulls into himself or walks out the door, jumps out a window or off a rooftop, like Jaime isn’t getting this right at all. Like there is nothing he can do, push the boulder to the top of the hill and it runs them both over on its way back down. “If I tell you enough,” Tim says, in that ridiculous husk of a voice, tiny dried up leftovers of his outburst, or. Or he doesn’t want to say it, but he’s doing it anyway. “You’ll leave.”

“ _No_.” Jaime is too tired to do something ridiculous, like kiss his head through the cabinet door, squeeze him too hard. This isn’t new, he’s heard it before and he’ll hear it again. If he could translate the things under Tim’s fingernails, that might be all it would say. The message on the tape might just say, _here’s your boulder, keep pushing._ Joins the coins in his pocket clashing and dragging him down.

Or.

“But I’ll want you to.”

Or that.

-

There’s no comfort on a kitchen floor, linoleum and cheap wood. The first apartment they looked at had hardwood floors all through, blue walls, more than one window. Just a little bit beyond budget, he’d almost convinced Jaime until the single bedroom, he’d stopped at a pale patch of floor in the corner, stripped and sanded down and stained just a shade or two lighter. “Was there a dog,” he’d asked, and the land lord confirmed, yes, just a small one.

She’d knocked the price down, Tim thought that would be the end of it. Welcome to your home away from home. Away from--

He couldn’t stop staring at the floor. Stripped and sanded, stained and resealed. They didn’t do a very good job. What kind of job had they done in the Gotham brownstone?

Jaime’s hand had found his, that grip, waking him up and pulling him away. “We’ll let you know,” he’d said. They never went back, moved into a place with carpet and tile and no space. Nowhere else to end up but the bed, tucked up between Jaime and the pillows and doing it slow, nobody talking for awhile. Talk with their hands, this is familiar, this isn’t, groping up and down. The right says _want this_ and the left says _stop that_ and the other right says _do this_ and the other left just touches Tim’s mouth, traces the slope of his lips and chin before tilting his face just right for a kiss.

This is the best they can do, he thinks. Meet in the middle and build a bubble to hide in for awhile. He still had a nightmare and elbowed Jaime off the bed; he’ll still patrol after the sun goes down until it rises again, but. Soft red light draws like a curtain over the room, a caramelized layer on the yellow walls, and he’s awake.

“Come with me tonight,” he says, settling a grip on Jaime’s hips and slotting their thighs and groins together. They don’t even move, for a minute, just holding and breathing, Jaime brushing a kiss up his face before his hips answer. “If you want.” Tim meets him in the middle, no rhythm, no urgency, just the slip and drag of their bodies taking the time to consider want, with the certainty of picking your favorite food from a familiar menu.

“Whatever you want,” Jaime breathes, pushing Tim’s shirt up with his arms, as his hands slide up and up along his back. I wouldn’t want you to leave, Tim doesn’t say, just: he’d never know. Jaime would stay, and he’d never know why.

He doesn’t want to stop reading everything Jaime does in the best light.

“I want to buy a new bed,” he says instead, shifting up and over, rolling on top so when his hips move, they bear down, harder. A better distraction.

Jaime snorts, breaking their faces apart. “Don’t push it.”

“What if this one breaks,” Tim asks, starting to nip at his jaw, rock his hips down while Jaime’s hands move down, his fingers fit through belt loops and _tug_.

“Yeah,” he says, just starting to lose his voice: “ _What if_?”


End file.
